Neal Rolls the Dice on Rococo Revival--and Wins

February 1st, 2015

Neal Auction Company, New Orleans, Louisiana

Photos courtesy Neal Auction Company

At the midpoint of Neal’s Louisiana Purchase auction last November, company president Neal Alford was already talking about the important estate he had on the schedule for early 2015.

Alford was talking about what he referred to as the Service collection of Grant A. Oakes (1938-2010), a businessman in Warren, Ohio, who started a company called Service Guide Inc. Oakes liked 1932 Fords as well, but he will always be best known for his collection of 19th-century Rococo Revival and Renaissance Revival furniture and lighting. A selection of lots from his estate in the January 31 and February 1 sale accounted for over $800,000 of the $2.4 million total.

Alford said, “Throughout the 1980s, he was the strongest collector of American Rococo nineteenth-century furniture, primarily focused on known Belter works.” Oakes obviously admired accomplished carving, and he bought the best of the best of his chosen period. Some find the style a bit much, but Rococo Revival is seductive, and the artistry captures the imagination. Alford is president and auctioneer, but he is also Neal’s enthusiastic 19th-century furniture guy. Notable in the Service collection were two small round tables, both estimated at $20,000/30,000, which sold on Sunday morning for $54,970 (includes buyer’s premium) and $60,945.

“There are two small circular tables that are drop-dead gorgeous,” Alford said. “You can see in those that John Henry Belter…was having an innovative moment. He had a genius for doing what he does. The delicacy of the lamination in those small tables is phenomenal. Whoever Belter was, he had a great understanding of the eighteenth century—of the forms, of his sources. He was somewhat of a purist in his understanding of Rococo design. The guy was a genius and an aesthete, and the laminating process got him to where he wanted to go.”

Discussing the collection as a whole before the sale, he continued, “This material was very carefully chosen by someone with the wherewithal to make choices and be able to afford them. Oakes wanted the best, was able to pay for the best, and ended up with the best. There’s no collection anywhere that has the quantitative consistency that this does. It’s representative of the very best work by a maker who has a very short tenure—so it’s even more intense than the way we’re talking about it. I think the marketplace for this particular group, which is…very sophisticated, I think the market for this material will be competitive with collectors of nineteenth-century American furniture and decorative arts. I think they’re going to be enamored of the qualitative superiority of this group.” Alford’s opinion was justified by the results. The estimates proved accurate and were consistently met or surpassed, sometimes in spectacular fashion.

Collectors had long known about the Service collection because so many individual pieces had been published. Many of them had appeared in the Dubrows’ American Furniture of the 19th Century, 1840-1880. Lighting of the period had been another passion of Oakes, and a number of those lots had been illustrated in 19th Century Elegant Lighting: Argand, Sinumbra, and Solar Lamps by Gerald T. Gowitt.

As noted, Oakes had been avidly collecting back in the 1980s, a decade when another great Rococo Revival collection, that of Gloria and Richard Manney, who had begun collecting in the 1960s, went on view at Winterthur. While agreeing that prices may have been very strong in the ’80s and ’90s, Alford pointed out that collections returning to the market are part of the regular auction cycle: “You’re going to see more and more of that, I suppose. Collections that were built thirty or forty years ago are coming to auction. A lot of the material will be deaccessioned from those collections, throughout the marketplace. Certainly, you hit the nail on the head in regard to a certain aspect of this group here coming to sale. They were collected, generally speaking, thirty years ago—and that’s what sales looked like then. What you’re seeing now is a pretty tight collection in this particular sale. It’s something we’re going to experience over and over. And this type of quality typically will attract newcomers to this area of collecting.”

While the Service collection made up most of the top-20 lots, the two-day sale presented several other strong collections, including historic maps, prints, and books from the estate of Donald E. Pierce, who was a physician in Greenwood, Mississippi, before retiring to Santa Fe. Marc Fagan at Neal handles these specialties and made several trips to New Mexico to examine the collection. Fagan found that Dr. Pierce had been an omnivorous collector with many interests: “Maps were just one part of his collection, but that part was very, very deep. He had a reference library of thousands of books, and hundreds were on maps. He came from Mississippi, and there are a lot of maps from that area, not just pretty maps but informative maps, esoteric maps about elevations and surveys of the Mississippi River. And then he moved out to Santa Fe and started buying Western things. All in all, it’s a pretty cool collection.”

One lot that Fagan expected to do well was “Lloyd’s Map of the Lower Mississippi River,” which ended up selling for $11,352.50 (est. $5000/7000). He explained, “It was a really good-looking wall map of Mississippi that’s pretty scarce, a map on rollers….That particular map was contested by a Texan who owns property indicated on the map and a Californian who owns a commercial interest in a town indicated on the map—the Texan won.” The Pierce material is being sold to benefit the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and brought a total of $124,000; more of the collection will be sold later.

For more information, call (800) 467-5329 or visit the website (www.nealauction.com).

Originally published in the May 2015 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2015 Maine Antique Digest